Study: WWW Can play a major role in detecting early outbreak of a disease

According to the team of researchers from Children’s Hospital Boston and Harvard Medical School, Web-based electronic information sources can play a major role in detecting early outbreak of a disease, and thus spread information about it. They gave examples of discussion forums, listervs and news outlets which can contribute a lot in this matter.

The researchers created HealthMap which is a real-time, automated web crawling system that gathers, organizes and disseminates online intelligence related to disease outbreaks.

Team member John Brownstein said, "Web-based electronic information sources can play an important role in early event detection and support situational awareness by providing current, highly local information about outbreaks, even from areas relatively invisible to traditional global public health efforts.”

According to Brownstein, HealthMap is a “multistream real-time surveillance platform that continually aggregates reports on new and ongoing infectious disease outbreaks.”

The reports are organized and disseminated in a variety of ways, he added, including the creation of disease maps and situational awareness windows.

Finally the enthusiastic researcher said that use of news media and other non traditional sources of surveillance data can "facilitate early outbreak detection, increase public awareness of disease outbreaks prior to their formal recognition, and provide an integrated and contextualized view of global health information."

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